Monthly Archives: February 2014

TL; DR Help fund story shedding light on the economics of leaving an abusive relationship I am about to start a big freelance reporting project, and I need your help to try and make it happen. My idea is to travel around the UK and interview survivors of domestic abuse about money. We know that domestic violence can affect anyone, rich…

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Imagine living in a house so cold, you stay in bed all day just to keep warm. This is the reality for hundreds of social housing tenants, as Jess McCabe discovered on the job with an affordable warmth officer Graham Parker (name has been changed) answers the door in his dressing gown. It is 10.30am, but if his Runcorn neighbours…

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Yesterday I took place in a virtual ‘debate’ organised by French construction company Saint-Gobain, about whether the Energy Bill Revolution is right in its call for how to fund the massive project of retrofitting the UK’s housing stock for modern demands for warm homes that are affordable to heat. I didn’t argue one way or the other, but I was…

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An interesting news story that came out of a feature I commissioned for Sustainable Housing: – 13 February 2014 | By Jess McCabe, Richard Shrubb A landlord claims it has slashed rent arrears close to zero by housing tenants in super energy-efficient Passivhaus homes. Three years after the first tenant moved into Hastoe Housing Association’s 28 Passivhaus homes in Essex and Norfolk, just…

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Yesterday I took place in a virtual ‘debate’ organised by French construction company Saint-Gobain, about whether the Energy Bill Revolution is right in its call for how to fund the massive project of retrofitting the UK’s housing stock for modern demands for warm homes that are affordable to heat. I didn’t argue one way or the other, but I was…

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Hydropower: blueprint for supplying energy to social tenants?

12 February 2014

An ecologically sensitive National Trust hydropower project could provide landlords with a blueprint for supplying energy to social tenants, as Jess McCabe finds out

Pristine is the word that springs to mind as the sun rises in the Great Langdale valley, glinting off the snow-covered mountain caps. Narrow and fast, the sound of the Stickle Ghyll stream rushing down the mountain is deafening, the water perfectly clear.

To the untutored eye, the awe-inspiring valley, dotted with the occasional sheep, does not seem to be an ideal location to build anything, let alone a hydropower plant. Indeed, the plan brings to mind the words of local poet William Wordsworth, who in protest at plans to build a railway through this area in 1844, wrote: ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure, from rash assault?’

Yet this is exactly what the National Trust is planning to do, to supply electricity to tenants and neighbours in the valley – and to Sticklebarn, which is not a location in the Lord of the Rings, but in fact a pub run by the historical protection charity.

Appearances can be deceiving – the choice of location turns out to have the force of logic and history behind it. The National Trust has selected Great Langdale as one of its first experiments with hydropower, as it strives to meet a target to generate 50 per cent of its energy from renewables by 2020, in part because of its history of industrial use dating back to the Neolithic era. It has a lack of sensitive plant or fish life, meaning the site fulfils the trust’s requirement that any work done on its land respects the ‘spirit of place’.

And the National Trust’s experiments with one of the lesser-known technologies for generating renewable power could be a model for social landlords, who until now have mostly stuck to solar power – the staple energy crop of the sector.

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Jess McCabe interviews Teri Gender Bender of Le Butcherettes and Bosnian Rainbows and wonders about the pressures of creating an explosive onstage persona Jess McCabe, 7 February 2014 A short introduction to Mexico’s riot-grrl-in-chief, Teresa Suárez: She’s the lead singer of Mexican punk duo Le Butcherettes, the band she launched with her best friend, aged only 17. On-stage antics include fake…